Why Your Monitor Can’t Display Some Colors

The modern PC monitor does an exceptional job of representing a photograph in light, built from hundreds of thousands, or millions of pixels, each capable of showing one of over 16 million colors. For those of you like myself who remember monochrome displays, it’s all very impressive.

Yet some colors just fall too far out of the supported range, or gamut for any screen to accurately represent.

In an article on PetaPixel, Will Nicholls breaks down the key points from the video.

When an image, or video, reaches your screen, colors are interpreted as a series of numbers that say how bright to make each of the red, green, and blue pixels. “Unless you’ve got a really fancy, expensive screen, those numbers run from 0 to 255,” says Scott. “0 means turn the pixel off, and 255 means make it as bright as it can go.”

So with some calculation wizardry, that means your average screen can show around 16 million colors.

“But that’s not every color,” warns Scott.

While the gamut, or range of color displayed by modern monitors is impressive, remember that sometimes, particularly with abnormally vivid colors you may have to settle for ‘close enough.’ This is often the case when color matching very bold-hued garments.

As technology moves on and High Dynamic Range and Wide Color Gamut find their way into more consumer tech we’re likely to see colors on our screens that we’ve never been able to view before. In the meantime, I’m afraid that sometimes ‘close enough’ will have to do.

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Introduction
Every now and then, an image comes along with complex color schemes that can be daunting to retouch. For such cases, isolating luminosity and color components of the image and tackling each one individually can be helpful.
First, we must...